Wednesday, May 04, 2011

You Want A Fortune Cookie?

You can't go wrong with stir fry. It's the fastest dinner you can make, short of pushing a few buttons on a microwave and ingesting horribly-bad-for-you food. It requires a bit of prep, like having everything sliced up and ready to be wildly thrown into an extremely hot wok, so as to avoid dilly dallying around...overcooking your food or starting fires, but prep work is the therapeutic part of cooking, for me, so I don't mind. This was one of those "I have 2 filet mignon steaks about to go bad if I don't cook them, but it's raining outside and I don't want to grill and we have a few veggies and a little bit of rice left" moments that make cooking history. Here's what I did to prepare this red pepper beef tenderloin stir fry.

Here's How You Do It:
Make rice/noodles according to package. Mix together cornstarch, soy and rice vinegar and add beef to mixture. Marinate beef for 30 minutes to an hour. Heat up a wok on medium-high heat. Add in vegetable oil and sesame oil. Add beef (not all at once...don't overcrowd your pan...do about 1/2 at a time). Stir beef constantly for about 2 minutes until it's just cooked (I like my tenderloin medium-rare, but if you like yours charred...by all means). Take meat out and set aside. Add in more oil if you need to and add red peppers. Stir about 3 minutes until just fork tender...you want them to have some crunch. At least I do. Take peppers out, set aside with the beef. Add in ginger, green onion, garlic and jalapeno, cook for about 1 minute. Add in beef stock and scrape your wok to get all that caramelized goodness off the bottom, it should make a slightly thick sauce due to the cornstarch in the beef marinade. If it doesn't throw it out and start over. JUST KIDDING....if it doesn't mix a little cornstarch (about 1 tbsp.) and water (about 3 tbsp) and add that to the wok and you should get a nice little sauce. If it's too thick add in more stock. You just have to play here...that's the fun part. Add everyone back to the wok to cover everyone with the yummy sauce and serve over rice. Garnish with cilantro.

You can add in mushrooms, baby corn, bamboo shoots, cashews, peanuts, whatever you want. But this is what I had on hand and it turned out to be better than anything I can get at a take out restaurant, minus the fortune cookie. You want a fortune? I see very delicious stir fry in your future. There.